Juice cleanses are disrupting work?!

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Read time: 1.5 minutes

What’s up, party people! It’s almost Friday!! We got a quick one for y’all today 👇

PARTY PLAN 🎉

🤷‍♂️ Mixed feelings about the labor market

🔄 Tech giant replacing thousands of workers

🧃 Juice cleanse affecting work?!

But first, MEMES!

MEME OF THE DAY

Job Search

Mixed feelings about the 2025 labor market

U.S. job seekers are split on whether the labor market will heat up or cool down in 2025, with 33% predicting a decline in jobs in their desired fields, 29% foreseeing an increase, and 38% reporting the same number of opportunities, according to last week’s report from Express Employment Professionals.

Job seekers are divided on the job search as a whole. 51% said they’re optimistic about easily finding a job in the next 6 months, but 49% said they anticipate difficulties.

👆 (the optimists are probably using JobParty.AI) 👆

In a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, 61% of job seekers said they believe they’ll find a new job within six months, declining from 66% in spring 2024 and 69% in fall 2023.

Employed job seekers were more optimistic about finding a new job in the next 6 months, and they have good reason to be. For most Americans, job hopping drives career growth faster than waiting on promotions. A recent Kickresume report revealed that only 17% of workers were promoted within the last 5 years, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Layoffs

Meta is replacing thousands of workers

Meta is planning to push out thousands of “low-performers” within the next month. This marks the first major layoff spree of 2025. CEO Mark Zuckerberg intends to push out and replace roughly 5% of the employees who’ve been at the Menlo Park tech giant long enough to go through the company’s performance review process.

In a memo, Zuck said he’s decided to “raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster.” He said the employees will be notified by Feb. 10, and they will receive “generous severance.”

According to Meta’s Q4 headcount of 72,404, approximately 3,600 employees will be replaced according to a memo to managers estimating the 5% reduction/replacement.

Work

Juice cleanses disrupting work?!

This week’s whacky work story comes courtesy of Inc.com, where readers can submit their questions/problems to a work/HR expert. Here’s the summary:

A reader asks:

I manage a team of five. One of my staff, Helen, does some variation of a week-long juice cleanse or other liquid diet about once per year, and has done so for the four years she’s been on my team. During that week each time, she arrives late or leaves early for three to four days due to headaches, dizziness, or generally feeling crummy.

Helen is a highly reliable employee the rest of the year and rarely gets sick. It’s not a terribly busy time of year, and she finishes all required tasks in that week during her cleanse.

This month, however, she wrangled another person on my team, Pearl, to join the cleanse. In the past four days, one or both of them have arrived late or left early every day because of some variant of feeling crummy. Pearl is less reliable and efficient than Helen, causing a slight backlog of tasks this week.

I do not want to become the sick-leave police. But I also feel like these employees are not coming to work prepared to do their jobs, for several days in a row. Is there a reasonable way to approach this?

We’ll let you read the full version and the “expert response” for yourself.

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